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Dealing with disappointment Oil slick makes Vegas a week of hardship
Updated: Sunday March 04, 2001 7:17 PM
I'm sure I'm not the first person to leave Las Vegas pretty frustrated, but that was the way all of the guys on the Mobil 1 team were. We had a good car -- we had a really good car. We felt like we had a good shot at winning the race. The bad part is that nobody knows it but us. I hit some oil slowing down for a caution early in the race and it flat tore up our car. We were able to come back for a little bit, but not for long. That's a bad feeling for any driver and any team. We started 14th and we were in eighth by the fifth lap. The thing was a rocket ship, and we felt we had a great chance of winning the race. But a caution came out because of oil and when you hit that stuff, there isn't much you can do. It's a pretty helpless feeling. What made it even worse is I ended up hitting my teammate, Rusty Wallace. He was slowing down for the caution, I was slowing down for the caution. We were doing everything you are supposed to do and that oil sent me flying. I feel bad for the Mobil 1 guys, but I feel really bad for Rusty's guys too. Both teams were just victims of circumstances. It's hard after something like that to start thinking about next week, but you have to do it in our sport. Every team out there has short-term goals but they also have long-term goals. You use the short term to take care of the long term. Short term, of course, is winning races and running consistently each week. Long term is the championship and doing whatever you can do to win that. You strap in the car thinking about winning the race. If you're not here to win, then you shouldn't be here. Winning isn't an easy deal, but it's not supposed to be. Still, that's what you are shooting for every week. Only if you reach a point where you can't win do you start trying to settle for less. If you can't get first, then you try everything you can for second. If you can't get second, then you do whatever you can do to get third. And on down the line. As far as the long term is concerned, you can't ever forget that this is a points deal. Every track pays money depending on where you finish, and there's usually a pretty nice trophy that goes to the winner. You run for pride, you run to show what you can do, you run as a team for each other. But you are out here for points. That's everything, plain and simple. There are some teams that don't seem to really start thinking about points until toward the end of the season. We're not like that at all, and I think that has made a difference for us in the past. You have to be as worried about points in March as you are in November. Still, every year you'll see guys working as hard as they can to fix a tore up car in a late-season race where they would have packed it up and driven home in the first Rockingham or first Atlanta race. Those points are just as important in March as they are in November. That's one of the reasons we were working so hard to get back into that race at Las Vegas. Like any other team out here, we've had bad luck in a race. Every one of those times it probably would have been pretty easy just to throw the car up on the hauler and head home, but the guys worked to get the car ready to go back out again. And we went back out. More than once, we were a bunch of laps down and we didn't have anybody much to race with, but we kept moving and kept moving, and we picked up a lot of positions towards the end of the race. That's the kind of attitude you have to have. In 1998, for example, we missed finishing in the top 10 by only 36 points. All winter long we were thinking about six positions. Over a whole season, if we had picked up one position in one of about every five races, we would have been in the top 10, on stage at the Waldorf at the banquet, the whole deal. Looking back, there weren't any instances where we just gave up that year. In fact, I remember cutting a tire at Texas after running away with the race and wrecking the car, but everybody working like the dickens to get us back on track. But in your mind you can go back and think, "If we'd done this or if we tried that ... " That sort of thing. Making good decisions and having good judgement is a key part of this sport. It's got to be there, not just from the driver but from the crew chief, the crew guys, the owners, everybody. You can't give up. You can't have a real disappointment and just call it a day. You have to scrap and fight and work hard to get anything and everything you can. One position can be the difference at the end of the year. Passing somebody to pick it up, beating somebody out of the pits to pick it up, just working to fix a problem and going back out to run to pick it up. It doesn't matter how you get it, but you have to do everything you can to get it. Look at the teams that have won championships. Look at what Darrell Waltrip and some of those teams were like. Look at what Bobby Labonte and his team had last year. They are really great race teams, no doubt. But they were able to take advantage of really good cars, and they kept fighting on their bad days too. My career has been spent scrapping to get to the front, just like crew chief Peter Sospenzo and so many of the guys on this Mobil 1 Taurus team. Every race is important. Every lap is important. We have some pretty high goals, you know.
Jeremy Mayfield is in his fourth year driving the Penske Racing No. 12 Ford. His diary will appear weekly on CNNSI.com in 2001.
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